Set the Record Straight
I’ve lived in this country for nearly a decade. Been a citizen for more than seven years. Yet, until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of Juneteenth, the June 19 commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States. Apparently, I’m not alone here. A majority of Americans, including those born and raised in this country, had never heard about this key moment in African American history until the current uprisings against police brutality and racism brought it to fore.
This ignorance speaks to the systemic erasure of the history and contributions of minority groups, especially African Americans, in America.
There is a lot missing, as well, from our collective understanding of the history of people of color in the environmental movement. Environmentalists of color weren’t usually invited into the mainstream environmental groups that rose to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s. But the fact is that people of color have been involved in the struggle for a better living world all along. It’s just that their pathway to environmentalism has been different, linked, as this study notes, to the structural issues their communities faced, such as “sovereignty, human rights, social inequality, loss of land base, limited access to natural resources, and disproportionate impacts of environmental hazards,” as well as “traditional working class environmental concerns such as worker rights and worker health.”
As with Juneteenth, POC environmentalists’ contributions too, have long been rendered largely invisible by the mainstream, White-led environmental movement.
High time we began setting the record straight.
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
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